Someone Charged $560 Worth Of Kindle Books To My Amazon Account; No One Seems To Care

Say what you will about print vs. digital and retail vs. online, but if you were to go into your local bookstore and show them proof that someone had somehow illegally purchased $560 worth of books there, you’d probably get a better response than the one Consumerist reader Joe received from Amazon.

Several weeks ago, he noticed that someone had hacked his Amazon account and sent $560 worth of Kindle books to Kindle that he doesn’t own. So he called Amazon right away and after eventually getting through to a human, was told that though they couldn’t cancel the orders, they would disable his account and have the money refunded within 48 hours.

After a couple of days, he checked his account to see if the money had been refunded. It hadn’t, so he contacted Amazon again.

“I got a new representative who had no record of my previous calls,” he tells Consumerist. “So after going through the same process again I was told the same thing.”

Concerned that his issue would once again be dumped into a black hole, Joe asked to speak to a supervisor, who not only assured him that she would look into it personally, but that she would call him back within two days.

“I waited to hear from her and then got an email on the third day saying she tried to call but my cell phone number was disconnected,” he writes. “The one I had spoken to her with two days before. So I called back, with the supposedly disconnected cell phone and got another new representative that had no record of my previous calls.”

So once again, Joe described what had happened and what had been promised. And once again, he received the promise of a refund within 48 hours. And yet another supervisor promised to contact him when the refund was processed.

Then he gets an e-mail from the supervisor telling him the good news that his refund will be process — in about 4-5 weeks.

“Five hundred and sixty dollars might not mean anything to a company as large as Amazon but that is my rent money and they can’t do anything better than make me wait 40 days when someone broke into their website and stole from one of their customers,” Joe tells Consumerist. “Not once have I felt like anyone actually cared about that much money being stolen from me. Not once has any one of the customer service representatives followed through with the promises they made me.”

We contacted Amazon on Joe’s behalf last Thursday and he now confirms that all the money was fully refunded by this morning. We still haven’t heard an explanation from Amazon as to why Joe was repeatedly given bad information about his account and the refund, but at least he’s no longer out $560.